The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907

Theagrarian question is the basis of the bourgeois revolution in Russia and
determines the specific national character of this revolution.

Theessence of this question is the struggle of the peasantry to
abolish landlordism and the survivals of serfdom in the agricultural system of
Russia, and, consequently, also in all her social, and political institutions.

Tenand a half million peasant households in European Russia own
75,000,000 dessiatins of land. Thirty thousand, chiefly noble, but partly
also upstart, landlords each own over 500 dessiatins— altogether
70,000,000 dessiatins. Such is the main background of the picture. Such are
the main reasons for the predominance of feudal landlords in the
agricultural system of Russia and, consequently, in the Russian state
generally, and in the whole of Russian life. The owners of the latifundia
are feudal landlords in the economic sense of the term: the basis of their
landownership was created by the history of serfdom, by the history of
land-grabbing by the nobility through the centuries. The basis of their
present methods of farming is the labour-servicesystem, i. e., a direct survival of the corvée, cultivation
of the land with the implements of the peasants and by the virtual
enslavement of the small tillers in an endless variety of ways: winter
hiring, annual leases, half-share métayage, leases based on labour
rent, bondage for debt, bondage for cut-off lands, for the use of forests,
meadows, water, and so on and so forth,ad infinitum. Capitalist
development in Russia has made such strides during the last half-century
that the preservation of serfdom in agriculture has becomeabsolutelyimpossible, and its abolition has assumed the forms of
a violent crisis, of a nation-wide revolution. But the abolition of serfdom
in a bourgeois country is possible in two ways.

Serfdommay be abolished by the feudal-landlord economies slowly evolving
into Junker-bourgeois economies, by the mass of the peasants being turned into
landless husbandmen and Knechts, by forcibly keeping the masses down to a
pauper standard of living, by the rise of small groups of Grossbauern, of rich
bourgeois peasants, who inevitably spring up under capitalism from among the
peasantry. That is the path that the Black-Hundred landlords, and Stolypin,
their minister, have chosen. They have realised that the path for the
development of Russiacannotbe cleared unless the rusty medieval forms
of landownership are forcibly broken up. And they have boldly set out to break
them upin the interests of the landlords. They have thrown overboard
the sympathy for the semi-feudal village commune which until recently was
widespread among the bureaucracy and the landlords. They have evaded all the
“constitutional” laws in order to break up the village communes by
force. They have given the kulakscarte blancheto rob the peasant
masses, to break up the old system of landowner ship, to ruin thousands of
peasant farms; they have handed over the medieval village to be “sacked
and plundered” by the possessors of money. Theycannotact
otherwise if they are to preserve their class rule, for they have realised the
necessity of adapting themselves to capitalist development and not fighting
against it. And in order to preserve their rule they can find no other alliesagainstthe mass of the peasants than the “upstarts”, the
Razuvayevs and

Kolupayevs.[3]They have no alternative but to shout to theseKolupayevs:Enrichissez-vous! — enrich yourselves! We shall make
it possible for you to gain a hundred rubles for every ruble, if you will help
us to save the basis of our rule under the new conditions. That path of
development, if it is to be pursued successfully, calls for wholesale,
systematic, unbridledviolenceagainst the peasant masses and against
the proletariat. And the landlord counter-revolution is hastening to organise
that violence all along the line.

Theother path of development we have called the American path of development
of capitalism, in contrast to the former, the Prussian path. It, too, involves
the forcible break-up of the old system of landownership; only the obtuse
philistines of Russian liberalism can dream of the possibility of a painless,
peaceful outcome of the exceedingly acute crisis in Russia.

Butthis essential and inevitable break-up may be carried out in the interests
of the peasant masses and not of the landlord gang. A mass of free farmers may
serve as a basis for the development of capitalism without any land lord economy
whatsoever, since,taken as a whole, the latter form of economy is
economically reactionary, whereas the elements of free farming have beencreatedamong the peasantry by the preceding economic history of the
country. Capitalist development along such a pathshouldproceed far
more broadly, freely, and swiftly owing to the tremendous growth of the home
market and of the rise in the standard of living, the energy, initiative, and
culture of theentirepopulation. And Russia’s vast lands
available for colonisation, the utilisation of which is greatly hampered by the
feudal oppression of the mass of the peasantry in Russia proper, as well as by
the feudal-bureaucratic handling of the agrarian policy—these lands will
provide the economic foundation for a huge expansion of agriculture and for
increased production in both depth and breadth.

Sucha path of development requires not only the abolition of landlordism. For
the rule of the feudal landlords through the centuries has left its imprint onallforms of landownership in the country, on the peasant allotments as
well as upon the holdings of the settlers in the relatively free borderlands:
the whole colonisation policy of the autocracy is permeated with the Asiatic
interference of a hide-boundbureaucracy, which hindered the settlers from establishing themselves
freely, introduced terrible confusion into the new agrarian relationships,
and infected the border regions with the poison of the feudal bureaucracy
of

			   central Russia.[1]Not only is landlordism in Russia medieval, but so also is the peasant
allotment system. The latter is incredibly complicated. It splits the
peasantry up into thousands of small units, medieval groups, social
categories. It reflects the age-old history of arrogant interference in the
peasants’ agrarian relationships both by the central government and the
local authorities. It drives the peasants, as into a ghetto, into petty
medieval associations of a fiscal, tax-levying nature, into associations
for the ownership of allotment land, i. e., into the village communes. And
Russia’s economic development isin actual facttearing the
peasantry out of this medieval environment—on the one hand, by
causing allotments to be rented out and abandoned, and, on the other hand,
by creating a system of farming by the free farmers of the future (or by
the future Grossbauern of a Junker Russia)out of the fragmentsof
the most diverse forms of landownership: privately owned allotments, rented
allotments, purchased property, land rented from the land lord, land rented
from the state, and so on.

Inorder to establishreallyfree farming in Russia, it is
necessary to “unfence”allthe land, landlord as well
as allotment land. Thewholesystem of medieval landownership must
be broken up and all lands must be made equal for free farmers upon a free
soil. The greatest possible facilities must be created for the exchange of
holdings, for the free choice of settlements, for rounding off holdings,
for the creation of new, free associations, instead of the rusty,
tax-levying village communes. The whole land must be “cleared”
of all medieval lumber.

Theexpression of this economic necessity is the nationalisation of the land,
the abolition of private ownership of the land, and the transfer ofallthe land to the state,which will mark a complete break with the feudal relations in the
countryside. It is this economic necessity that has turned themassof Russian peasants into supporters of land
nationalisation. The mass of small owner cultivators declared in favour of
nationalisation at the congresses of the Peasant Union in 1905, in the
First Duma in 1906, and in the Second Duma in 1907, i. e., during the whole
of the first period of the revolution. They did so not because the
“village commune” had imbued them with certain special
“rudiments”, certain special, non-bourgeois “labour
principles”. On the contrary, they did so because life required of
them that they should seekemancipationfrom the medieval village
commune and from the medieval allotment system. They did so not because
they wanted or were able to build a socialist agriculture, hut because they
have been wanting and have been able to build a really bourgeois
small-scale farming, i. e., farming freed as much as possible fromallthe traditions of serfdom.

Thus,it was neither chance nor the influence of this or that doctrine (as some
short-sighted people think) that determined this peculiar attitude towards
private ownership of the land on the part of the classes that are fighting in
the Russian revolution. This peculiar attitude is to be explained by the
conditions of the development of capitalism in Russia and by the requirements of
capitalism at this stage of its development. All the Black-Hundred landlords,
all the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie (including the Octobristsand the
Cadets) stand for private ownership of the land. The whole of the peasantry
and the proletariat are opposed to the private ownership of the land. The re
formative path of creating a Junker-bourgeois Russia pre supposes the
preservation of the foundations of the old system of landownership and their
slow adaptation to capitalism, which would be painful for the mass of the
population. The revolutionary path of really overthrowing the old order
inevitably requires, as its economic basis, the destruction of all the old forms
of landownership, together with all the old political institutions of
Russia. The experience of the first period of the Russian revolution has
conclusively proved that it can be victorious only as a peasant agrarian
revolution, and that the latter cannotcompletely fulfil its historical mission unless the land is nationalised.

Social-Democracy,as the party of the international proletariat, the party
which has set itself world-wide socialist aims, cannot, of course, identify
itself with any epoch of any bourgeois revolution, nor can it tie its destiny to
this or that outcome of this or that bourgeois revolution. What ever the
outcome, we must remain an independent, purely proletarian party, which
steadfastly leads the working masses to their great socialist goal. We cannot,
therefore, under take to guarantee that any of the gains of the bourgeois
revolution will be permanent, because impermanence and inherent contradiction
are immanent features ofallthe gains of the bourgeois revolution as
such. The “invention” of “guarantees against
restoration” can only be the fruit of shallow thinking. We have but one
task: to rally the proletariat for the socialist revolution, to support every
fight against the old order in the most resolute way, to fight for the best
possible conditions for the proletariat in the developing bourgeois
society. From this it inevitably follows that our Social-Democratic programme
in the Russian bourgeois revolution canonlybe nationalisation of the
land. Like every otherpartof our programme, we must connect it with
definite forms and a definite stage of political reform, because the scope of
the political revolution and that of the agrarian revolution cannot but be the
same. Like every other part of our programme, we must keep it strictly free from
petty-bourgeois illusions, from intellectualist-bureaucratic chatter about
“norms”, from reactionary talk about strengthening the village
communes, or about equalised land tenure. The interests of the proletariat do
not demand that a special slogan, a special “plan” or
“system” shall be invented for this or that bourgeois revolution,
they only demand that the objective conditions for this revolution shall beconsistentlyexpressed and that these objective, economically
unavoidable conditions be stripped of illusions and utopias. Nationalisation of
the land is not only the sole means for completely eliminating medievalism in
agriculture, but also the best form of agrarian an relationships conceivable under
capitalism.

Threecircumstances have temporarily deflected theRussian Social-Democrats from this correct agrarian programme. First,
P. Maslov, the initiator of “municipalisation” in Russia,
“revised” the theory of Marx, repudiated the theory of absolute
rent, and revived the semi-decayed bourgeois doctrines about the law of
diminishing returns, its connection with the theory of rent, etc. To
repudiate absolute rent is to deny that private landownership has any
economic significance under capitalism, and, consequently, this inevitably
led to the distortion of Marxist views on nationalisation. Secondly, not
having before them visible evidence that the peasant revolution hadbegun, Russian Social-Democrats could not but regard its
possibility with caution, because the possible victory of the revolution
requires a number of especially favourable conditions and an especially
favourable development of revolutionary consciousness, energy, and
initiative on the part of the masses. Having noexperienceto go
on, and holding that it is impossible to inventbourgeoismovements, the Russian Marxists naturally could not,before the
revolution, present a correct agrarian programme. But evenafterthe revolution had begun, they committed the following
mistake: instead ofapplyingthe theory of Marx to the special
conditions prevailing in Russia (Marx and Engels always taught that their
theory was not a dogma, but aguide to action), they uncritically
repeated the conclusions drawn from the application of Marx’s theory
to foreign conditions, to adifferentepoch. The German
Social-Democrats, for instance, have quite naturally abandoned all the old
programmes of Marx containing the demand for the nationalisation of the
land, because Germany has taken final shape as a Junker-bourgeois country,
and all movements there based on the bourgeois order have become completely
obsolete, and there is not, nor can there be, any people’s movement
for nationalisation. The preponderance of Junker-bourgeois elements hasactually transformedthe plans for nationalisation into a
plaything, or even into an instrument of the Junkers for robbing the
masses. The Germans are right in refusing even to talk about
nationalisation. But to apply this conclusion to Russia (as is done in
effect by those of our Mensheviks who do not see the connection between
municipalisation and Maslov’s revision of the theory ofMarx) is to reveal an inability to think of the tasks each
Social-Democratic party has to perform in special periods of its historical
development.

Thirdly,the municipalisation programme obviously reflects the
erroneous tactical line of Menshevism in the Russian bourgeois revolution,
namely, a failure to understand that only “an alliance between the
proletariat and the

			      peasantry[2]can ensure the victory of this revolution, a failure to understand the
leading role the proletariat plays in the bourgeois revolution, a striving
to push the proletariat aside, to adapt it to a half-way outcome of the
revolution, to convert it from a leader into an auxiliary (actually into a
drudge and servant) of the liberal bourgeoisie. “Never enthusing,
adaptation using, forward then slowly, ye workers so lowly”—these
words of

Nartsis Tuporylov[4]against the “Economists” (=the first
opportunists in the R.S.D.L.P.), fully express thespiritof our
present agrarian programme.

Combatingthe “enthusiasm” of petty-bourgeois socialism
should lead not to the contraction, but to the expansion of the scope of
the revolution and its aims as determined by the proletariat. It is not
“regionalism” that we should encourage, no matter how strong it
may be among the back ward strata of the petty bourgeoisie or the
privileged peasantry (Cossacks), not the exclusiveness of various
nationalities—no, we should make the peasantry see how important
unity is if victory is to be achieved, we should advance slogans that will
widen the movement, not narrow it, and that will place the responsibility
for theincompletebourgeois revolution on the backwardness of the
bourgeoisie and not on the lack of understanding of the proletariat. We
should not “adapt” our programme to “local”
democracy; we should not invent a rural “municipal socialism”,
which is absurd and impossible under an undemocratic central government; we
should not adjust petty-bourgeois socialist reformism to the bourgeois
revolution, but concentrate the attention of the masses on the actual
conditions for the victory of the revolution as a bourgeois revolution, on
theneed for achieving not only local, but “central” democracy,
i.e., the democratisation of the central government of the state—and
not merely democracy in general, but the absolutely fullest, highest forms
of democracy, for otherwise the peasant agrarian revolution in Russia will
becomeutopianin the scientific sense of the term.

Andlet it not be thought that at the present moment of history, when the
Black-Hundred die-hards are howling and raging in the Third Duma, when thenec plus ultraof rampant counter-revolution has been reached and reaction is perpetrating savage acts of political vengeance upon the revolutionaries
in general and the Social-Democratic deputies in the Second Duma in
particular—let it not be thought that this moment is
“unsuitable” for “broad” agrarian programmes. Such a
thought would be akin to the backsliding, despondency, disintegration, and
decadence which have spread among wide sections of the petty-bourgeois
intellectuals who belong to the Social-Democratic Party, or sympathise with
this Party in Russia. The proletariat can only gain by having this rubbish swept
clean out of the ranks of the workers’ party. Yes, the more savagely reaction
rages, the more does it actually retard the inevitable economic development,
the more successfully does it prepare the wider upsurge of the democratic
movement. And we must take advantage of the temporary lulls in mass action in
order critically to study the experience of the great revolution, verify this
experience, purge it of dross, and pass it on to the masses as a guide
for the impending struggle.

November-December 1907

[1]Mr.A. Kaufman, in hisMigration and Colonisatian(St. Petersburg, 1905), gives an outline of the history of Russian
colonisation policy. Like a good “liberal”, he is excessively deferent to
the feudal landlord bureaucracy.  —Lenin

[2]Thatis how Kautsky expressed it in thesecondedition of his
pamphletSocial Revolution.  —Lenin

[3]Razuvayevand Kolupayev—types of capitalist sharks
portrayed by Saltykov-Shchedrin, the Russian satirist.

[4]NartsisTuporylov(Narcissus Blunt-Snout)—the pseudonym
under which Y. 0. Martov published his satirical poem “Hymn of the
Contemporary Russian Socialist”, which appeared inZarya,
No. 1, April 1901.